


i thought the earth remembered me (she took me back so tenderly)

by drowninglovers



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Ch 1 is a table of contents w more tags/warnings/notes, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, References to Addiction, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:27:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 19,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22651006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drowninglovers/pseuds/drowninglovers
Summary: a collection of mary oliver-inspired prompt fills from tumblr (original prompt listhere).title fromsleeping in the forestby (you guessed) mary oliver
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier & Commander James Fitzjames, Lt Edward Little/Sgt Solomon Tozer, Lt John Irving/Lt Edward Little, Thomas Jopson/Lt Edward Little
Comments: 26
Kudos: 50





	1. Table of Contents

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> because it's easier than including a block of tags

chapter breakdowns will be arranged like such:

Chapter #: character(s) + _prompt_

> _prompt in its entirety_

↪️ relationship to canon  
↪️ wordcount  
↪️ relationship(s)  
↪️ warnings   
↪️ notes/misc tags

* * *

Chapter 1: Terror lieutenants + _Evidence_

> _**Evidence:** keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable_

↪️ canon-compliant, episodes 7 & 10  
↪️ 1.5k  
↪️ none   
↪️ canon-typical cannibalism, violence & implied/referenced character death  
↪️ none 

* * *

Chapter 2: James Fitzjames - _Of Power + Time_

> _**Of Power & Time:** I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame_

↪️ canon-compliant, episode 8  
↪️ 1.2k  
↪️ can be read as fitzier (doesn't have to be tho!)  
↪️ none  
↪️ the mortifying ordeal of being known

* * *

Chapter 3: John Irving - _Of Power & Time_

> _**Of Power & Time:** I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame_

↪️ modern au  
↪️ 1.2k  
↪️ none  
↪️ none  
↪️ trans irving

* * *

Chapter 4: Edward Little + _Evidence_

> _**Evidence:**_ _keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable_

_↪️_ modern au  
↪️ 2.3k  
↪️ little/irving  
↪️ none  
↪️ accidental/assumed relationship + friends to...well, not quite lovers, but, friends to _something_

* * *

Chapter 5: Harry Goodsir + _For Example_

> _**For Example:** _ _I love this world, even in its hard places_

↪️ post-canon fix-it  
↪️ 1.9k  
↪️ mentioned goodsir & silna  
↪️ none  
↪️ none

* * *

Chapter 6: Tozer/Little + _The Summer Day_

> **_The Summer_** _ **Day:** what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious_ _life?_

↪️ canon-era, various levels of compliance  
↪️ 3.3k  
↪️ tozer/little, but predominantly tozer-centric  
↪️ canon-typical violence, mention of suicide, mention of euthanasia  
↪️ time loop au

* * *

Chapter 7:Jopson/Little + _Heavy_

> _**Heavy:** the time I thought I could go no closer to grief without dying_

↪️ post-canon fix-it  
↪️ 1.5k  
↪️ jopson/little  
↪️ some references to former alcohol and drug addiction   
↪️ the mortifying ordeal of being known, again

* * *

Chapter 8: Little & Irving + _WIld Geese_

> **_Wild_ ** _**Geese:** you do not have to be good._

↪️ _maurice_ (1987)-inspired au. some vague historical references, no relation to canon whatsoever  
↪️ 2.3k  
↪️ little & irving (can be read as verging on romantic)  
↪️ none  
↪️ script/play format

* * *

Chapter 9: Irving/William Malcolm + _Staying Alive_

> _**Staying Alive:** how can we ever stop looking? How can we ever turn away?_

↪️ post-canon (the extent of which is up to you!), historical references   
↪️ 2k  
↪️ irving/malcolm   
↪️ none   
↪️ epistolary

* * *

Chapter 10: Silna + _When Death Comes_

> **_When Death Comes:_ ** _I was a bride married to amazement._

↪️ the expedition exists as historical reality (no tuunbaq), silna is an underwater archaeologist trying to find the wrecks  
↪️ 2.2k  
↪️ none  
↪️ referenced non-graphic character death   
↪️ vaguely supernatural uses for the Power Of Love

* * *

further chapters coming soon!!


	2. I - Terror Lts. + Evidence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Evidence: keep some room in your heart for unimaginable

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt given by [saintssebastian on tumblr](https://saintssebastian.tumblr.com) / [phoebus on ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phoebus) sorry 4 the misery

1.

For the first moment, after he reaches the top of the hill, gazing down at the slight valley below, he assumes his eyes must deceive him. It has to be a mirage of some sort, that is the only half-logical explanation he can force into his brain. Can mirages occur so far north or are they dependent on the sand and the sun? He supposes what he’s seeing _could_ be a sundog. 

But, those are slashes in the sky, basic fragmentation of sunlight. A sundog is not the production of an image, and if it were, it certainly could not produce one, let alone six human forms. No, the only way he can be seeing this is if they are truly before him. And if they are, therein lies hope. A sliver of it, yes, but a sliver is all they need.

(There is another option, one he doesn’t wish to consider. Scurvy has been laying waste to them all, bit by bit, and eyesight is no exception to this. When he wakes, when he removes his goggles, if he looks too long at an expanse of grey, his eyes need a moment to catch up. One of these days he’s worried they won’t be able to. Then he’d join the men who are too ill to walk, take his place atop the sledge like a fattened calf to laid out on an altar. He wonders how long they would indulge in this before they determined him deadweight. But that is not something he wishes to dwell on. Blame it on the rot turning him inside out, this place, the misguided swell of hope in his chest, but more than anything let his eyes not deceive him.)

Wasn’t this what he wanted, what they all desperately needed? Some sort of miracle? This family before him can’t have enough food to feed them all, but they could show them how and where to find game. Their people must have some point of contact with Canadian trappers. If the Captain talked to them, he speaks the language well enough and appears friendly with them, and explained their situation, maybe they could send word down to Fort Resolution. They may not make it there, 800 miles is an unimaginable distance to travel be it on foot and unattached, or dragging along the remnants of their lives behind them. But if someone knew they were there, that would change everything. They would not have to die undetected.

In a matter of minutes, of course, this will all be undone. Potential contact between their party and the Netsilik will be severed before it even had a chance to succeed. And he will die, alone but not hungry, bleeding out thousands of miles from home. It will take him by surprise in the first moment of his death (a death that has been chasing him for years), how similar elation and horror feel when they are first experienced. How foreign the concept of survival is after resigning himself to a cruel, drawn-out end; only for his dying breaths to be no less cruel but so quick he hardly had time to accept that this one good deed would die with him.

2.

The bear—the creature? Creature seems more accurate as the mass of fur and rage in front of him has even less resemblance to a drawing of a white bear up close, but he finds it easier even now to conceptualize it as something familiar—has a strange sort of beauty up close. In truth, it is not pleasant to look at. Far too many teeth and features that hold an uncomfortable similarity to his own prevent it from being enjoyable to look at, but there is something compelling about it (him?) nonetheless. This whole ordeal would be a staple of parlour rooms for years to come if it were happening to someone else, if there were a chance that they would survive this. Instead, the only discussion of their expedition will be of their deaths and not the manners of them.

When he held out his tongue for the Body of Christ he swore he could feel it travel the entire way down to his stomach. His body was so heavy afterwards. Funny how something so light that it could not be called sustenance managed to fill him for the rest of the day. Something scared him that afternoon. Not the rituals, not the ornamentation, the crucified Christ above the altar so lifelike in his agony that he felt a phantom twitch in his abdomen as though the spear pierced _him_ there as well, but something he couldn’t put a name to until he first saw the Creature. There was power in his actions. There was God living inside of him. Catholics had to consume their God to solidify their connection to him, but what is consumption but another act of joining?

He couldn’t see the bear that night on the ice (or was it day? He cannot remember if it was before their last sunset or during the long night. Despite their best efforts, the days melted one into another, and he finds his memory at times to be lacking. There is so much about this voyage he wishes to forget and yet it is those memories which are at the forefront of his mind). Only a blur of white that fell burning from the mast. Only its claws and enormous hindquarters. It was easy for him to pretend it was a bear then. But now, staring it down as it picks off mutineers one by one, there is no room for charades.

The last time he encountered this Creature, he ended up separated from the rest of the expedition. Maybe this meeting will return him to his fellow men. This is how he is going to die: pitiful and a coward with Doctor Goodsir’s corpse heavy in the pit of his stomach as the body of Christ (and before that it was Billy Gibson who they dined on and pretended it was anything else, before that he spent three days wandering, a bite of leather from his boots all he could manage before his body rejected it, before that it was poison). An unsatisfactory end for an unsatisfactory life.

3.

One of his instructions from before the ship left port was to avoid touching metal with his bare skin. In the polar cold, it only takes a second of contact for the skin to freeze on metal. And he was diligent to avoid this. He remembered Captain Crozier letting a spyglass brush against the delicate skin of his eyelid and the wound it left for weeks afterwards. The night of Mr. Blanky’s attack, once Dr. MacDonald began to saw in earnest, he forced himself to look away lest his stomach churn onto the operating table, and caught a glimpse of Sgt. Tozer cradling his hand where a chunk of skin from his palm stayed behind on the canon. But when he decorates his face with chains, it does not hurt at all. It will only hurt when he tries to remove them, and he has no intention of doing that. The men whose possessions he ransacked for a few handfuls of gold won’t be missing them now.

He doesn’t remember who the first one to die was, nor the order in which those men wasted away alongside him. They were supposed to be his men, he was supposed to be in charge of them, not given an ultimatum between loyalty and certain death. They fell away one by one. Each morning, he’d wake—praying he wouldn’t, or praying that he would but in his bed back in England; he’s unsure of which would be preferable now—and there’d be another dead man’s smell filling his nostrils. Sometimes they’d bury him if enough men had the strength to pile on the rocks; or at the very least, he’d say a few words in the case that the dead man could not count on his mates numbering among the living. He could never construct an adequate eulogy for any of them. The one thing he wished he could say, _I’m sorry, I didn’t want it to end like this_ , stayed caged in his chest.

In the final days, they wouldn’t waste time with pretenses. Only salvage the usable parts and do away with the rest. He tried not to lower himself to that level, did not want to feel gristle between his teeth. He didn’t think he could live with himself.

And yet…

He was given an order to stay alive, the least he can do is follow it.

Would they have gone with him to raid the mutiny camp if he had a chance to ask? Would their small group have made any difference to Hickey or would they just be more fuel, more food for him to sink his teeth into? Does it matter now, whether they would have saved the Captain or not? It doesn’t matter. But, it’s nice to imagine a world in which something goes right for him for once, and he is not saddled with responsibility unfathomable to his family back home. It helps to hold onto his principles even though they won’t do him any good now.

From several yards away, he hears the crunch of boots over gravel.


	3. II - Fitzjames + Of Power & Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of Power And Time: I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for [ithrowmyviolets](https://ithrowmyviolets.tumblr.com) on tumblr who requested 'Of Power And Time + any character you want' and an anon who asked for the same prompt but specifically with jimmy fitz. sorry this is absolute misery yet again.

"I tell you, one glance from him I have to remind myself I'm not a fraud." As soon as the words leave his mouth, he feels a kick to his gut. A taunting voice in his head, not dissimilar to his father's, or how he imagines his father must sound, says _well, aren't you? What does Crozier see that's incorrect?_ This voice in his head has been his companion since he first understood his inadequacy. Its tone is cold and gruff, void of affection but entirely English.

He wanted someone to see him, didn't he? Isn't that his dream? To not have to pretend in front of another person? To have someone see him for who he is and not the splendid fiction he’s made himself out to be. But he didn’t want it like this, the way Crozier’s eyes cut him down in an instant as if to say _you thought you could fool me? Everything I’ve been killing myself to achieve you’ve had handed to you and you don’t even have the decency to be humble._

(Consider James, aged 5, talking to a nanny in the Conninghams’ house. Even then he knew that this family was not his own. The first fiction he learned to swallow was an easy one— _you belong here_. That isn’t to say that he grew up with an absence of love, for it was quite the opposite. Rather, from as early as he could conceptualize his illegitimacy, he was aware that love was conditional.)

* * *

Sometimes he wonders if he even counts as a person, if he can call this life his, or if it’s naught but a collection of stories. One day he’ll run out of those, and what will he have then? A couple of tatters of a history that would bring him scorn and an insatiable need to be liked. What a legacy to be had.

(Consider James, aged 12, a green midshipman on the HMS _Pyramus_. The Conninghams had no naval connections, and no reputable captain would take a sailor of illegitimate birth. Reputable, being the keyword. A good name can open any number of doors, even if it isn't his own.)

* * *

James Fitzjames, the man who survived the same wound that was Nelson’s undoing, who kept a pet cheetah and performed in fantastical plays, is an excellent man to know and a good friend to count upon. He is not, however, a worthy hiding place. James Fitzjames should have died when he got shot at Zhenjiang. He should have died walking a thousand miles through the desert to deliver mail, because wouldn’t that be an excellent title ‘best walker in the service’. He should have died twice of malaria; he should have been the one to get taken by the Creature. Not Graham, least of all Sir John, not any of the good, honest men on this expedition whose lives ended with fire, claws, or fear. It should have been him. He doesn’t know how he’s survived this long, what he’s living for. He’d like to imagine the universe has some grand purpose for him; that all his recklessness will come in handy someday. But now, it feels like a taunt.

What kind of life has he been living when he’s harboured himself away behind acts of valour—acts of valour that were wonderful stories for dinner parties and admiralty galas, but mean very little. What does the cup he got for saving a drowning man matter to him when he can't do anything to keep his men alive now?

(Consider James, aged 28, finding George Barrow at a house of especially ill-repute and getting them both out with nothing but his charisma and an enormous sum. He got a promotion and Barrow had nothing but shame to wear over his shoulders and James wonders if he would have done the same, were their positions reversed. It could have happened to either of them, but he would have had so much more to lose.)

* * *

It's not quite love, the thing he needs. He’s lived without it for long enough, he can go a little longer. Admiration, yes, passion, yes. But not love. What nearly kills him for want of it, is for someone to look at him and see him all the way down. He’ll do amazing things to be seen, but it’s never in the way he needs. Just once, he wants someone to look beyond the bravado and the posturing, and to ask him about something that matters. When he speaks, he wants people to hang onto his every word, not because he can spin a compelling yarn, but because they actually care for him.

 _Did you confuse attention and affection, my dear boy_? The voice poses, and James wishes the ringing in his ears were strong enough to drown it out. _I know it must be so easy to mix up those two._

What the fuck did his father know about affection?

But maybe that’s too much to ask for. When he’s spent his years crafting a life that’s better on paper than in practice, it’s a lot to ask for someone to see a truth that’s drowning in falsehood.

(Consider James, aged 32, signing up for this Expedition because he thinks it’ll finally be a chance to prove his mettle as more than a charmer with a knack for tall tales. It's an excuse for him to leave England. Maybe, if he goes far enough, he’ll find a man worth knowing lurking below his skin.)

* * *

_I don’t want to pretend anymore,_ he thinks, feeling the rot inside of him bubbing up to the surface, _I don’t want to die not having told the only story that matters. If by some goddamn miracle we make it back to England, I do not want to return as I came. I need to stop running._

“I’m a fake, brother.”

From a dozen feet ahead, Francis stops dead in his tracks.

At first, he wonders if the man heard him at all, and prays he did. If he’s going to admit this, he’ll do it but once and he won’t dare repeat himself. When Francis turns, there’s the awful openness to his face that replaced the flush of alcohol and James wants to tell him every horrible thought that’s kept him awake at night; every moment of uncertainty, the way he half-hoped the bullet in his spine would do him in because death was easier than fumbling under the weight of all these half-lives. He wants Francis to know him. He’s going to die here. There's a fraction of a chance that a lucky few of them will make it out of this hell alive, but he will not be one of them. The pain in his torso, the weakness of his muscles tells him otherwise. If he is going to die here, let James Fitzjames the story die too. One person should have the burden of truth, and he can think of no better man.

 _See me_ , he thinks, and Francis does.


	4. III - Irving + Of Power and Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> of power & time: i have wrestled with the angel and i am stained with light and i have no shame

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt given by [saintssebastian on tumblr](https://saintssebastian.tumblr.com) / [phoebus on ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phoebus)

It’s been fifteen years, near to the day, since he was last in Edinburgh. Fifteen years since he stole from the house in the dead of night, stocking-footed with a bag over each shoulder as he crept from the first-floor window with the bad lock. From there, he dashed past several other houses—all as antique and affluent as his—to the waiting van with the killed engine, driven by one of Malcolm’s cousins returning to Warwick after the Easter holidays. It was a cold night, a moonless night, he remembers that much. How the stones were cold under his socks as he stopped to slip his shoes on away from the creaky floorboards outside his bedroom; the slice of the wind through the three jumpers he was wearing under his jacket all the way down to the bone. More than anything, he remembers how he felt as the van turned off Princes Street. Not quite frightened by the enormity of what he was doing, the consequences it would have on him later in life. But he wasn’t elated either. He was running toward something but couldn’t quite comprehend that _he_ was the one doing this. It felt very much like a dream.

Your dream-self is never really you. Not entirely. They don’t know the things you do, or they make choices you would never consider. It creates a strange sort of paradox. The dreamer becomes their own voyeur. They are at once both inside and outside of themself, watching and aware, but unable to change anything.

That feeling comes back to him now, while he weaves between the tourists trying to decode the docent’s accent as she talks about Gainsborough and groups of art students with pads and pencils, scattered across benches and floor space. The National Gallery is different than he remembers. Though that’s expected, it has been fifteen years and he was still half a child the last time he laid eyes on it. Many paintings are the same, some have moved to different rooms or different positions with updated plaques, but there are new things too. He took a map upon entry, unsure of how well he could survive on memory alone. It’s bigger than he remembers, while somehow smaller.

 _You don’t have to do this_ , it’s what people have been telling him since before he hitchhiked over the borders where so many stories he loved were said to occur. _You don’t owe him anything_ , countless people have said this, but it’s a favourite saying of his therapist. She’s about the age his brother George would be if he had lived, but her hair is a shock of pure white. Said it turned that colour all at once when she was twenty-three. No medical explanation or scientific reasoning for why, a fluke. Her accent’s like his was growing up, less posh, but close enough that after their first session he almost asked to switch to someone whose voice didn’t remind him of who he might be if he’d never left.

He doesn’t have to do this, and he doesn’t owe his father anything. But, despite that, he wants to.

He’s not here to make reparations, fall to his knees and beg for forgiveness. In fact, he doesn’t even want to give his father the privilege of seeing him. If he can go this whole trip without laying eyes on the man, that’d be grand. What he wants is to tell the truth that he couldn’t bring himself to say when he was young. The whole truth, now that he can say it without flinching.

_Dad, I’m gay._

_Dad, I’m trans._

No, he’d better start with that one. Otherwise, his father might get confused.

_Dad, I’m trans and I’m gay and you’re a pitiful imitation of a father and an even worse one of a human being_

No, that’s a little bit too hostile from the get-go. He’s earned the right to be hostile—another thing his therapist tells him—but he’s too tired to pick a fight now.

 _Huh, Larkin was right. They really do fuck you up, your mum and dad. Mum’s been dead most of my life and you_ still _managed to be around less than her._

No, that one doesn’t feel right.

He exists here and now but feels as though he is living in someone else’s head. Consider the painting in front of him, Gauguin’s _Vision of the Sermon_. The blood-red foreground, the bend of the tree in the middle of canvas partly obscuring a subject that’s been captured hundreds of times over: Jacob wrestling with the angel. He feels a kinship with Jacob, locked in an unfair and unchanging struggle, overpowered by an unjust wound, and even then refusing to concede without his blessing. He feels a kinship with the angel, maybe mortal, maybe divine, either way holy, begging for release. And he feels a kinship with the women in the painting, bearing witness to the extraordinary without being there at all. He exists here and now, he is grappling and grappled, and he is watching from the outside.

Jacob wrestled with an angel and for his unyielding strength was gifted a new name that praised his courage. Who’s say he didn’t do the same?

You know, there wasn’t a John Irving before him. Of his siblings, that is. There was one in every generation, hell his family line probably started with a John Irving, but none of his brothers were gifted the name. His father, also a John Irving, could probably name each of his forebearers chronologically, paying close attention to the one who was friends with Sir Walter Scott, and the one who was lost at sea. That’s a big thing with his father, history. People who forget history are doomed to repeat it, but what about men like his father who never forget? They’re trapped in a loop, only looking backwards, unable to see what’s in front of them.

Who was the first John Irving named after? The Baptist, the voice crying in the wilderness whose head ended up on a gilded plate? Or the apostle, a Son of Thunder beloved by Christ? Which one did he take his name from? _Did you choose your name because you wanted to spite your father?_ His therapist asked him once, and a decade earlier he almost would have said yes. He might’ve said that he chose his name because until the day he died his father would have to live with the knowledge that they shared something. It’s close enough to the truth, maybe it was closer when he was younger. No, here’s the truth: he chose that name because he felt like it was meant for him. There was open space in his family tree waiting for him to rush in and claim it.

_Hi dad, you probably won’t recognize me. That’s okay, you didn’t when I was younger, either._

Leaning against the fence outside the National Gallery his thumb hovers over the keypad before pressing 0-1-3-1, praying that his father counts himself among those who still have a landline.

_I will not let thee go, except thou bless me._

The phone rings.


	5. IV - Little + Evidence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Evidence: keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a very silly (and shippy) modern au for an anonymous request!

This is the third Poundland they’ve been to today. George is searching for broccoli cheese pasta and apparently going to an actual, goddamn grocery store instead of another Poundland is out of the question.

“If you try to drag me to a fourth Poundland, I am going to scream,” Edward threatens. It would be a threat if there was any real promise behind it, but he thinks they pump something in the vents at Poundland that breaks down your defences to make you all the more vulnerable and inclined to purchase unnecessary things.

“You’re not going to scream in the middle of Poundland,” is George’s response from where he has most of his upper body wedged into the bottom shelf with a semicircle of discarded products around him. The way he’s searching you’d think he’s moments away from discovering Narnia, resplendent with magical broccoli cheese pasta, at the back of the shelf.

No, he isn’t _actually_ going to scream in the middle of Poundland. What he does do is pull out his phone to see why it’s been vibrating non-stop since approximately halfway through the second Poundland. The answer is that there are 470—no, make that 471—new messages in his groupchat with his siblings. Most of them can be reread later when he can’t feel his brain leaking out of his ears; there’s local drama, Important Family Secrets Suddenly Revealed and the lot, several increasingly blurry photos of a dog large enough to have its own postal code. But there’s one message that makes him pause.

> **GROUP NAME:** [italian mobster voice] familia
> 
> **Charlie:** _yo ned can you forward a question about scotland to your boyfriend from me? i’m too lazy to use google_
> 
> **Edward:** _You mean John?_
> 
> **Charlie:** _yeah i mean john who you’ve been dating for 3.5 years?_
> 
> **Lou:** _wait omg did you break up_
> 
> **Simon:** _oh way to GO Charlotte_
> 
> **El:** _I am so sorry!!_
> 
> **Maggie:** _Foot, meet mouth._
> 
> **Charlie:** _i didn’t know!!!!!!!_
> 
> _i’m so sorry_
> 
> _if it makes you feel better he always seemed like /really/ repressed_
> 
> **Edward:** _We didn’t break up because we were never dating_
> 
> _We’re just friends who are separately gay in the same vicinity_
> 
> _Please hold._

"So, my fa" he starts but is interrupted by George's triumphant emergence from where he was almost completely consumed by the bottom shelf, seven bags of pasta clutched lovingly in his arms.

“Victory is mine, and it will be delicious!” he proclaims, with all the bravado of an aristocratic explorer who mistakenly believes himself to be the discoverer of some unbeknownst land. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off. What were you going to say?”

“My entire family thinks that John and I are dating.” He intends on saying it like a joke, like ‘haha listen to this weird thing I learned’ but the sentence ends up coming up strained, almost a question.

If this at all fazes George, he doesn’t show it. He reshuffles the pasta before asking “aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Well, that puts a damper on things.”

* * *

The ride back to their flat is silent save for the radio (George is going through a bit of a Russian composers period, so they make it through the first two movements of Rimsky-Korsakov’s _Scheherazade_ —a 1969 recording of the USSR State Symphony Orchestra, because George never does anything in half-measures), turned down low in case either of them wish to talk. There are a million things Edward wants to say, but settles for helping George carry in the bags. They accumulated much more than the pasta on their Poundland quest, the weather channel predicts a storm on the way. He’s silent as George sets about making his pasta. He makes the process needlessly complicated. Despite the packaging saying it’ll cook in 8-10 microwave minutes, he insists on using a burner, says it really elevates his 99p delicacy like he’s a fucking Michelin-starred chef.

Edward perches against the counter, because it’s comfortable and because their flat, for all its other virtues, has a kitchen whose size is best suited to the tiny rat chef from _Ratatouille_. “Do _all_ our friends think John and I are dating?”

There isn’t even a pause. Only a simple “yes” and somehow that’s worse.

This is an overreaction. It’s probably an overreaction. After all, what’s there to comment on besides the fact that this was an unexpected misunderstanding. It’s not as though he has to tearfully announce to their friends that yes, they _have_ been hiding a secret relationship for years, or that he’s having an affair. Clearing things up will be simple. Once this blows over, it will be a funny anecdote to tell if either of them ever gets married. Like that one unhinged ‘Prom Dress/Wedding Dress’ article for _The Odyssey_. _You_ may be his lawfully-wedded husband, but _I_ was the one people thought he was dating for years.

“How long?”

“Well I can’t speak for the others, but I assumed you were together from about New Years Eve 2018.”

Here is a comprehensive list of all the things Edward remembers from the unmitigated disaster that was New Years Eve 2018. Also, let the record state that he was probably the soberest person that night. That is to say, that he didn’t drink, but was on a near-lethal amount of Benadryl and, as a result, spent the vast majority of the night feeling like he was clipping through reality.

  * Graham’s one work friend (who he admitted sort of weaselled his way into an invitation, and Graham was too nice of a person to uninvite him) talking relentlessly about his irritable bowel syndrome
  * A very small kitchen fire
  * The hour and a half where Walter went missing and they debated sending out a search party for him before finding him with his head halfway in the downstairs toilet, his body revolting after being filled with most of a bottle of red wine and an alarming amount of cheese
  * It took three people and a pocketknife to get the cork on the champagne off because they were all terrified of taking someone’s eye out
  * _Party in the USA_ played at least four times
  * A solid third of the night he spent vegetative on the couch and entrenched in an existential crisis. It wasn’t spurned by anything in particular. Just the inevitable passage of time, the promise of ageing and death, and the fact that with half the planet being on fire and the other half barely worth saving, it’s quite silly for him to worry about growing old.
  * The cat deciding that his right shoulder was an adequate sleeping location (hence the previously-mentioned Benadryl)
  * John, possibly drunker than any human being has ever been while still being mostly upright, deciding that his left shoulder was an _excellent_ sleeping location and pinning him in place until well after midnight
  * Slinging John over his shoulder and insisting he crash with him and George because rule #1 of being a good friend to not leave your friend, who lives alone on the other side of town, in a situation where he could choke on his own vomit
  * _Oh_.
  * Motherfucker



“Your hand spent a lot of time on his thigh.”

“His body spent a lot of time refusing to obey the laws of gravity but I understand where you’re coming from.”

“A lot of things were happening, I assumed that was one of them”. It’s kind of sweet, that George accepted that two of his friends were dating without hesitation. It’s also kind of strange that he let two years go by without ever raising the subject.

Though when explained like this, it makes sense enough. If he were involved only as a witness he’d likely have come to the same conclusion. “What was it _after_ New Years then?”

“Well…”

“Well, what?”

“Well you two kind of act like this is a mid-Victorian novel and you’ve either been carrying on an emotional affair from your school days and live in fear of someone stumbling upon the passionate love letters you’ve been exchanging. Or, it’s still a mid-Victorian novel but one of you is the idle, introverted son of a rich man and the other is the brooding gardener who he runs away with after forsaking his family name and fortune.”

“Those are both..specific.”

“That’s the only way I can describe your weird dynamic.”

“Am I the gardener in the second scenario?”

“Of course you’re the gardener, Ned.”

* * *

He hasn’t been thinking about this. 

No, not at all. In fact, on a list of ‘things that have rattling around in his brain like spare change in a coat pocket’, the fact that everyone he knows has been under the impression that he and John have been dating for somewhere in the margin of three years is only number 6 out of 10. Granted, he’s more preoccupied with the major ice storm the entire country’s been hit with, the wind that’s well over 100km/hour, and the worrying sound their radiator is making.

(For the record, his current top 5 list of worries looks something like this:

  * Their power and heating going out as a result of the storm.
  * The pear tree in front of their flat getting taken down by the wind and plunging through their living room, sending glass everywhere, possibly killing one of them in the process, and leaving a nice big hole for the wind and freezing rain to come through.
  * How they are to cook in the event that their power and heating go out. Well, beyond eating shredded cheese out of the bag like an animal.
  * Freezing to death like some wretched orphan in a Dickens novel after the power is knocked out.
  * Any of the above happening to [insert friend/family member] in [insert place].)



“Do you think _John_ thinks we’re dating?” Edward asks, unsure if he wants the answer to be yes or no. They are in the fifth hour of their _Blackadder_ rewatch, though it’s actually on mute. The wind is too loud to hear much of anything, and they don’t want to be surprised in the case that one of their windows does shatter. And besides, between bored history teachers who didn’t have the motivation for a lesson, and their natural predispositions towards the show, they could recite the dialogue verbatim even without subtitles.

“I think that even if you were dating he still wouldn’t be aware,” George answers with alarming immediacy. “There’s be a very firm line between dating and not-dating for him.”

Well, that makes sense. It makes him feel a little better, knowing that he wasn’t unintentionally leading John on. Personally, he’d be miffed if he were dating someone for upwards of two years and the most action he got was a somewhat inebriated thigh grab. A thigh grab and several dozen sleepless nights’ worth of secrets spilled; coffee orders memorized and passages and books underlined with ‘I thought you’d like this’ penned in the margins. A shared scarf or two, Spotify playlists sent back and forth, he’s sure he gave John flowers once after he moved because his apartment was so Spartan and sparkless it needed a little bit of colour to prove someone with a beating heart lived there. What were they? Geraniums, he remembers, he liked the colour. A perfunctory Google search tells him they represent ‘true friendship’. That’s good. At least he didn’t pick up flowers that meant ‘I’m desperately in love with you and if you don’t reciprocate I am going to hurl myself into the nearest body of water’.

Oh god. _Are_ they dating? It would be so easy to make that one change.

“You’re rather hung up on this,” George observes which isn’t shocking considering he may as well have won a gold medal for facial gymnastics over the past twenty-four hours.

“Yeah, I am.”

“Do you think it’s a shock because your unconscious desire to date him manifested in going through all the motions of dating without any of the pressure should things fall apart.”

“Well fuck me, unconscious desires. I wasn’t aware Sigmund Freud’s name was on the lease.” It’s a far nastier thing than he should have said, and he apologizes in the next breath before George even has the chance to look hurt. There’s a long pause before he says “…maybe,” and it feels like an admission of guilt.

Their current episode of _Blackadder_ is cut short without ceremony when George lunges forward to yank the remote from the table. It’s fine, they’d stopped paying attention around an episode and a half ago. The following exchange is frantic, their voices folding into each other. Edward hardly has time to think or even breathe between words.

“If he asked you out, how would you respond?” George asks.

“I’d need more context than that.”

“You don’t get any! John asks you if you’d like to go on a date with him, his intentions are explicit, what do you say?”

“Well…”

“No hesitation, yes or no”.

“Yes, I suppose.”

“Why?”

“Well, because he’s nice and I enjoy spending time with him and think he’d make a good boyfriend and…”

“And…” George prompts. The Freud comparison, cruel as it was, wasn’t too far off. The entire situation bears an eerie resemblance to therapy. Come to think of it, he has mentioned John to his therapist. Many times. Wonderful, another person to add to the list of people who probably think they’re together.

“And because I have tremendous affection for him.” Christ on the cross, they do have the dynamic of forbidden Victorian lovers. ‘Tremendous affection for him’, what bloody century does he think he’s in?

George sits back with a self-satisfied smile. There’s an I-knew-it playing at the corners of his lips even if he won’t say it.

Somehow this makes things more and less complicated at once.

* * *

It’s close to midnight when his phone buzzes. As of 11:37 PM, they still have power, food, running water, an intact flat, and the majority of their mental stability. John’s picture—a selfie of him standing in a large field of canola, squinting against the sun, his profile yellow-tinged by the golden-hour sunlight—fills the screen.

> **John:** _my entire family is under the assumption that not only are we together but that we have been for several years?_

_‘Do you want to be?’_ he sends back.


	6. V - Goodsir + For Example

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For Example: I love this world, even in its hard places

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt given by [dedraconesilet](https://dedraconesilet.tumblr.com/) on tumblr who requested "something Goodsir & Silna (either the obvious _For Example_ or maybe _The Summer Day_?)". sorry there's only incidental silna.

Bodies fill every inch of the exhibition hall. 

It seems every newspaperman in London, half the Admiralty still on dry land, and, anyone who wanted a story and could sneak in is calling his name. Well, they’re calling for _Doctor_ Goodsir and, despite most every school in the country offering him degrees from their medical colleges, he’s accepted none. If he’s to call himself Doctor he wants to earn it, not have it handed over in sympathy on a gilded platter. But to whom does his lack of degree matter? Not to the crew, who started calling him Doctor when there was nobody else to hold the title, nor to the tabloids who began to churn out headlines from the moment he stepped back onto dry land. Of course, it was him. Out of veterans and practiced physicians, of course, he was the one who made it back. A modern medical man for a modern age.

_EDINBURGH ANATOMIST ONE OF FEW SURVIVORS OF FRANKLIN’S DOOMED EXPEDITION_

That was his favourite one. He hated the way it said ‘few’, as though it was their fault their numbers dwindled upon return, as though every life they saved wasn’t precious. He hated the way it said ‘doomed’, as though they had no choice in the matter. True, nature did not consult them before encasing their ships in ice too deep to leave any option but flee. Disease never asks permission before making a battlefield of the body. They knew there were risks attached to such a perilous journey but never considered that one of the biggest threats they carried with them from England. They should have never had to consider that something so banal as incorrect soldering would nearly do them in. Nothing about their tragedy was inevitable.

_“Doctor Goodsir, when did you realize the problem with the tins?”_

The only reason why he agreed to this conference, why he agrees to anything nowadays, was because he thought there was a chance to talk about some of his discoveries in the early days of the voyage. There are still things about those years he can recall without feeling his stomach roll, despair settling heavy in the spaces between his ribs. They are far and few yes, but there were still moments of grace. He is trying to live in those moments.

_“Doctor Goodsir, how far do you reckon you walked?”_

But nobody ever wants to hear about science unless it can be spun into sensationalist drivel that’ll sell out in minutes. After all, tragedy brings in more readers than victory. Prior failure makes an achievement later on all the sweeter. Triumph in the face of adversity, David slays Goliath with nothing but a sling and his determination. Ha, as if England’s ever been anything other than Goliath. As if one farmboy with a stone and some spare sackcloth could actually make a difference. But it matters less whether they tried and failed than if they never tried at all.

_“Doctor Goodsir, did you ever believe you weren’t going to make it back?”_

Even after they were back on a ship he found it hard to believe that they were going home at all. It seemed that Britain was some marvellous fantasy they’d dreamt up to keep the terror at bay. A place with equal greenery-the saturation of which matched those days only by the crimson of open wounds-and civilization. Mills and cathedrals, farms and ruins; no pack ice, white bears only stuffed in museums or captured by artists’ brushes. And more than anything, people. People crammed tight into falling-apart boarding houses and lounging in estates large enough to fit thrice their current inhabitants. Families, they had families once.

He would have stayed, were it an option. Were he not one of a Doomed Few who owed it to the families of those left behind, he would have stayed. If he could have stayed with Lady Silence—with Silna, she gave him her name in a whisper, right hand against her heart under all those furs. _Silna ujunga_. She trusted him to remember her even when he left—he would have been glad to do so. Perhaps he will go back in a few years, once he’s done all he can. There will still be ships searching for the passage, one, five, probably a hundred years from now. He’ll find one that will take him back.

“What were they like, Doctor Goodsir, the Esquimaux?” one reporter asks, his voice close to cracking with eagerness. Harry’s eyes find him easy enough in the crowd, his stomach sinks when he realizes this man is more of a boy. A boy with a wisp of a moustache and a pair of spectacles which magnify his pupils to overblown, owlish proportions. Nothing but a boy piloting a man’s body, hoping nobody looks too close and sees the truth.

“What’s your name?” Harry asks.

“Bram Leslie, Doctor Goodsir, sir,” the boy answers, cringing at his own words, the repeated syllable a rookie error, “with _The Illustrated London News_ ”.

“I will say this once, Mr. Leslie, and I shan’t repeat myself. If anyone wants a quote for their broadsheets I’d recommend you ready your pens. We owe them our lives, the Netsilik. We would have died and they would have been well within their rights to watch us without lifting a finger to help. They showed us how and where to get food, they helped nurse our sick and ease our dying’s suffering. It was because of them that our rescue party knew where to find us. We did not deserve their kindness. We encroached on their territory with little regard for their feelings or history and still, they helped us.”

Even with their help, he couldn’t save nearly as many as he hoped. He remembers each man who died under his hands. Not only his name and rank, but his hometown, his best mate, the cadence of his voice. He is making a choice to remember the dead as they were when they were whole. He wants to choose life. There will always be moments where he wishes he could have done more, when inadequacy shifts into a physical presence the way the cold did. Maybe he could have done more. Or, maybe he did all he could. Maybe that was enough. He must live with these choices for the rest of his life, however long it shall be he may as well grow to accept them.

Pens are still scribbling furiously as he rounds off the last sentence. Droplets of ink stain pristine collars, a week’s wages spent on. He wonders how the different papers will spin this story. The Tories will call him a crackpot, say something came loose in his brain during all those freezing months. But that doesn’t matter. He told the truth.

His next words greet a deafening silence. When a sheet of paper flies from a reporter’s pad, the rustle of it coming loose echoes the way a gunshot would. “I’d’ve stayed if I could.” He’s heard silence like this before, the weighted kind that forms around them a vacuum of their own solitude. When they left the ships, they were so used to the constant creaks and groans of ice against timber, that they talked the first few nights on the shale to keep the silence away. He could breathe in a little too sharp, and a man would hear it on the other side of camp. When the wind picked up on the nights it snuck under their skin, it was something out of a nightmare. Howls like that can only mean death.

It was so quiet he could press two fingers to the side of his neck and the drum of his pulse was the loudest thing for miles. Even now, he gets nervous if there is too much quiet. The same goes for cacophonies. He spent the first two weeks back in England holed up in a hotel room because too many voices at once reminded him of Carnivale.

“It was beautiful there, and I would have stayed,” he continues, and wonders how much of this the papers will actually print, “had I not owed it to my family to return home intact. Had I not owed my deepest condolences and fondest memories to the families of those who did not. Had I not owed it to the Netsilik to speak of their generosity. There are so many stories that will be told of this Expedition, and so many that will never get to be told. I do not wish for mine to be defined by sorrow. It was beautiful there, I wish I could have stayed.”

King William Land is beautiful the way sunlight glinting off a blade is beautiful. It could kill him before he could blink and it would almost be worth it. Beauty does not mask its danger, nor does the danger deter its beauty, not for him. Rather, they seem to feed each other. It would be a shame to forget nature’s predatory heart, that they have adapted to fit it rather than the other way around. The dark and the cold were worse than he could imagine at first. After four months ashore, he wears more layers than every other person in any given room and feels his eyes are far better adjusted for darkness than light. They didn’t need lamps out on the tundra, a full moon could light the way for miles. He grew used to seeing himself bathed in silver. If it were warm enough during the Long Night, he could gaze up at a clear sky and watch the moon change phases in front of his eyes. He’d’ve stayed there for days on end, tracking shifts in her appearance if it were possible.

And then there was the Aurora and despite what others thought, he never got tired of seeing the sky overtaken by shades of green he’d never seen anywhere else in nature. Great swaths of colour and more stars than he could count even if he had several lifetimes. The delicate casings of hoarfrost around their possessions, the perfect stillness of being alone with naught but himself in the world. Even the creaking and groaning of the ships grew familiar to him, the same way the tumble of their rescue vessel against the waves was like coming home. He remembers Inuktitut’s vowel sounds, the shifts in pitch, how the words fit badly in his mouth. Each word he spoke felt trapped behind a mouthful of cotton, the syllables unwieldy on his tongue; but when Silna spoke he could almost understand what she was saying despite the barrier between them. He can’t even imagine where she is now, if there’s anybody with her. He wants to imagine she isn’t alone. He wants to imagine that if he were to come back, she’d remember him and she’d smile. 

When he thinks about the Arctic, he remembers wonder. He is trying to carry that wonder with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i try not to toot my own horn too much but if you've enjoyed any of the prompts so far, especially this one, i made an entire powerpoint drawing parallels between the terror and mary oliver which can be found [here](https://nedlittle.tumblr.com/post/189852292938)


	7. VI - Tozer/Little + The Summer Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Summer Day: what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> requested by whalersandsailors [on tumblr](https://whalersandsailors.tumblr.com) / [ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whalersandsailors)

As of today, June 30, 1848, Solomon has died 77 times. He is, at the moment, considering making it 78 so he does not have to bury Armitage. Though, he is unsure of the rules, whether the loop will close only when they return to England, or if he'd die for good. And, even then, despite how much he wishes one of his deaths stuck, he's tried so hard to keep the crew alive. It would be a shame for him to take it back now. Besides, with 77 deaths, he's buried every one of his friends already.

The first time he came back, he thought it was a dream; some panicked dying vision. After three days shipbound (not being slowly crushed, not reeking of death), after Heather sitting next to him in the mess, the way his clothes fit rather than hanging slack, it became clear that it wasn't. He wasn't sure why _him_. There had to be better choices, better leaders. But maybe this is some twisted idea of absolution.

If he did anything wrong, any violation of the articles, it was to keep his men safe. Maybe that's why he keeps coming back.

* * *

The second time, he swears he won't make the same mistake twice. He won't fall for Hickey's plans, won't meet his end with a roar and the glint of teeth. That lasts until the lashing. He knows the kind of man Hickey is. Hell, he knew the first time. But, there's something about the way his body contorts around the lash that fools him into believing it could be different. His death is much the same.

The third time, he watches Hickey wrench a ring from David Young's cold hand and remembers the faint glint of silver on Billy Gibson's pinky during the Long Night. That kills any impending mutiny plans for good.

* * *

Preventing the ships from leaving port isn’t an option either. Whenever he wakes up, they’ve already been at sea a week. And trying to convince command to turn back with no logical reason is beyond foolish. He still tries though, even if he doesn't think it would work. After seven times waking up flailing in his hammock—the latest after he was hanged for sedition. He couldn’t tell the Captains why they needed to leave and this was the next-best solution he could think of—he decides that he may as well try to figure out _why_ they get trapped in the ice for so long. If there’s no avoiding it, he ought to find out why they’re in this mess to begin with. He spends nights in the rigging with Blanky who looks at him like he somehow has an inkling of what’s going on, shares a pinch of his tobacco every now and then, and does not call any of his questions stupid even when they are. Unfortunately, even Blanky doesn’t know why the ice hasn’t melted. Blanky in any of their loops can’t figure out why the ice won’t melt, only that it _should_.

In fate's cruellest twist yet, the ice thaws in loop 15, but it takes him and the rest of _Terror_ ’s marines under with it.

* * *

By loop 20, he’s desperate enough that he considers killing Sir John while there’s still a chance to turn back. There’s no way their Captain will sacrifice progress for safety. He gets as far as considering poisons, how he could pull something from the sickbay and sneak it into his food or drink, before he finds he does not have it in him to murder Sir John. As fortune would have it, Sir John does die before that ill-fated hunting blind. But instead of being carried off by that Thing, he succumbs to two gruelling weeks of pneumonia. After they lay him to rest, command is so devastated by this loss that it almost isn’t worth it trying to get them to walk out.

Sol tries anyway, but can’t convince anyone to budge. This time they freeze, the entire expedition crowded in _Terror_ when the ice pierces her hull. She’s halfway crushed before they begin to sink in earnest.

* * *

He thinks he’s got it sorted when he replaces Bryant on Gore's sledge party. Nobody to shoot the shaman, no reason for the Creature to set its sights on them. The solution should be simple. It’s Des Voeux’s finger on the trigger that time and the shaman bleeds out before they can load him onto the sledge. The Creature makes quick work of the rest of them.

He tries for the same tactic the next three loops. In the first, he's hit by a hailstone twice the size of his fist during the storm and does not wake. In the second, the bullet hits not the shaman but Lady Silence, and the Creature provides no mercy. In the third loop, they return with no casualties and no Creature on their tail and may well survive. They die anyway.

* * *

There is one loop where he manages to save Heather from that Thing, and another where he pulls Heather from the flames at Carnivale. There are two loops where Heather wakes: one right before they walk out—and his eyes close for good only scant hours after they reopen—and one where he wakes alone, unable to open his eyes. Dr. Peddie says it is the fear that does him in, same as it did David Young. The worst loop is when he survives all the way until they’re about to walk. Heather is alive but not living and there is no way they can haul a comatose man without killing him. Solomon waits until the sickbay is empty, places a pillow over Heather’s face, and holds it there. This action meets no resistance. Sol remains at his bedside until his next watch, hugging the pillow. Wilkes finds him there in the early morning (or night, time has become quite the elastic thing to him) with dampened eyelashes and the pillow clutched to his chest. Then, of course, there is the loop in which he throws himself between Heather and the Creature's claws. There is a moment when he feels his blood darken the deck and the odd sensation of wind against his brain before everything goes blank.

Sometimes death is whiteness, like the snow and ice they’ve come to think of as halfway between home and hell. An endless cocoon of nothing so cold it almost burns. Other times it is a growing inkblot over his vision, devouring up any last shreds of survival. And sometimes, there's nothing at all. Out like a candle. But never does it get easier. He doesn’t want it to get easier. If that happens then what’s there keeping him from giving up entirely?

* * *

What interests him the most is that the Creature has no bearing on whether they live or die. If it doesn’t pursue them, nature does its part. Sometimes he almost wishes the Creature would take them instead. Being picked off one by one, having his soul wrenched from the remnants of his body, it would be preferable to watching his fellows become shadows of themselves. He tries to ask Lady Silence one of the times they bring her aboard. _Tries_ being the operative word here. There are rather a lot of gestures and rudimentary drawings since he has no words in her language or his to fully explain what’s going on. And it isn't as though he can ask someone to translate without seeming completely mad. Maybe he is going mad, this is all the fevered ravings of a man dragging himself to death. But Lady Silence seems to understand him, or, maybe she pities him. Though she seems to comprehend what he’s trying to tell her, she can provide no explanation for why this is happening.

There’s something with magnetism and the poles, right? He’s had time enough to read through _Terror_ and _Erebus_ ’ libraries, trying to wrap his head around potential explanations. Their compasses don’t work properly this far north, and time trips them up with days of sunlight after nothing but night for months. Perhaps there’s a scientific explanation for why this is happening. Time being stretched thin over the pole. More likely, he’ll never have the words to name his situation.

* * *

The shortest loop is #65. Sol wakes long before anyone else. The question that’s been troubling him, more than how this is possible, more than why the ice refuses to melt, is why him? One of the Captains would make a difference, even a lesser officer would be more helpful than him. This whole scene feels like a joke. He wasn’t even able to keep his marines alive. How on earth is he supposed to be responsible for two ships’ worth of men? This isn’t ever going to stop. They will keep dying and he’ll keep coming back and there isn’t anything he can do about it. He has squandered each of his 65 chances of survival. It only stops when he dies.

Solomon rises from his hammock and takes the steps down to the hold with care. All he wants is for this to stop. This won't save the men, what he's about to do, but it will put an end to all this. He finds a shattered bottle of spirits and, before anyone can note his absence, slices into his veins.

* * *

His death never broke the loop before; why should it make a difference if it's by his own hand?

* * *

By loop 70, he has a formula. He complains early about the tins, collects the bits of lead from between his teeth and takes them to the sickbay when he complains of searing headaches and a wicked fire in his joints. It’s a truth and a lie. The symptoms never start this early but, after dying so many times, he never feels whole. Crozier’s dried out earlier these past few loops. That isn’t his doing, though. He doesn’t stop to consider the logistics, only knows that it means less work for him. The sooner the Captain sobers up, the sooner they can leave the ships, the better chance they have of making it out. His station gives him some leeway with convincing the wardroom that walking out would be their best option, but it’s the rest of the crew who are hesitant to agree. _If we’re going to die here_ , Strong argues, _we should die like sailors on our ship. Not crawling home like dogs._ He keeps Irving away from Hickey, too. There isn't much he can do about Hickey short of strangling him, so he's been trying to keep him away from trouble.

Lately, they haven’t been bothering with Carnivale, which spares him the stress of preventing the fire, but it means they start walking while it’s still dark. The worst of it isn’t the heart-killing cold or the knowledge that their eyes will burn when they see the sun again, it’s that they lose men in the night. Some wander off to relieve themselves and never find their way back. In the early days, they carry lanterns only at the front of the pack and it is easy for the men at the back to lose sight of the crew. It makes burials more difficult as well.

Sol’s put bodies to rest since about the 30th loop. After all, he’s the reason why they’ve been dying over and over again. It’s the least he can do, making them comfortable despite knowing that they will not rest.

* * *

Over the course of 9 separate loops, he and Little fall into bed together. Sometimes it lasts, sometimes it doesn’t. He half-wishes it would stop happening because he doesn’t need the distraction from his task. But, wishing something would stop doesn’t mean anything as he knows all too well.

At the very least, it goes better than the first time. Nobody gets concussed. As the loops continue, the relationship feels natural. More than a way to get closer to the Captain, more than an outlet for the restless energy he feels radiating off of him, all his nerves about whether they’ll survive. If he’s to trapped here for the near and distant future, he may as well make the most of it.

This is why it’s all the more embarrassing when Little is the one to find him hunched over himself in his tent. He’s learned to cry without making a sound, but cannot yet master the art of sorrow without the release of tears. To his credit, Little doesn’t say a word. He unslings his rifle and removes his hat, settling down beside Sol. Wind-burned fingers come to rest in the space between his shoulder blades.

Once he can breathe without feeling like his throat will close, Sol considers a very stupid idea. More stupid than murdering Sir John. More stupid than loop #11 when he thought his greatsword could do more damage to the Creature than a gun. What is it going to matter whether he tells one person about his...condition? Little won’t believe him and, even if he does, it won’t make a difference. They’re both going to die, maybe tomorrow or two months from now. Then, it will start all over again and maybe they’ll sleep together in the next loop too, or, maybe, Sol won’t even spare him a second glance.

“I’ve something important to tell you,” he begins, close to laughter at the sheer incredulity of it. “And you mustn’t say anything until I’m finished.”

“Alright then.”

* * *

His final loop begins with a miracle. A day before they reach the Whalefish Islands, John Torrington begins to cough so hard his body nearly caves under the strain of it. He’s sent home without further question. John Hartnell too boards the _Barretto Jr_ after much persuading by Mr. Goodsir. Braine stays with them, dying a few days into April as he always does. But, at least seven men will see their families once more.

He brings up the lead at the earliest convenience, telling MacDonald who promises to tell Sir John, who in turn says that he noticed it but does not think it to be a problem. He is conscious, in informing MacDonald, that he is audible from the hall. Word spreads within the week that they are being poisoned, though nobody uses that word yet. Another rumour posits that the ice will not melt and they will spend another year frozen solid. He’s careful not to be seen spreading such gossip, he learned that lesson early on. Before Sir John is even cold in the grave, there are whispers of unease among the ships. The Passage isn't worth being trapped like this. Sir John maintained unflappable faith in the Navy, God, and himself which clouded his vision but Sir John is dead. The only thing stopping them from walking is a squabble between the Captains. Though, that seems unlikely. As Crozier’s sobriety becomes more reliable, so do relations with _Erebus_.

Sol knocks on Crozier’s door, his speech prepared three loops ago. He doesn’t wait for an invitation inside, nor for permission to speak. He doesn’t even take in his surroundings before barreling on. “Captain, I’ve been consulting Mr. Blanky and he does not believe that the ice will melt this year. He also believes, from experience, that if we are to walk in search of help, it should be sooner rather than later. The men, too, consider it to be our best chance at survival. There have been murmurs in the galley for weeks and—” when he cuts himself off to breathe, he spies something odd.

Crozier is not surprised by the tumble of words from his mouth, and his cabin is stark. Crates occupy most of the table and all the chairs, save for those occupied by Crozier and Little. Little does not look at him, keeps his eyes focused on the spread of paper in front of him.

_They’ve already started packing._

“You’ve got a keen ear, Sergeant,” Crozier says, something that could be a smile or a grimace pulling at the corners of his mouth. “Captain Fitzjames and I intend on making that announcement tonight. We will likely start the journey in a week’s time.”

One week’s time. That puts them at a month before they normally start walking. The sun will be rising for their first few days. One month early with no Creature pursuing them, the putrid tins disposed of, and no mutinous stirrings (to his knowledge). If he were a betting man, he’d bet that this loop could be his last.

* * *

Solomon admires the wooden gravemarker with ‘T. Armitage, 1805-1848’ carved into it with a dull knife. Then, below it, ‘Ecclesiastes 12:7: _and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God, Who gave it_ ’. Armitage wasn't a particularly devout man, neither is Solomon, at least not in the way he ought to be, but it felt wrong not to include an epigraph. Then, he crouches low enough to fill his palm with stones and sets to work piling them in front of it. He doesn’t hear the footsteps behind him. A second pair of hands appears and begins crafting a miniature cairn on the other side of the grave. They work in silence for a few minutes, moving across the row to decorate the other graves, those of Wentzall, Strickland, and Wall. Little hands him the stones and Solomon stacks them, he’s had enough practice for several lifetimes. When it’s over, they turn back to Armitage.

They were days from Fort Resolution when Armitage collapsed. Not dead, it took until they’d gotten good and settled at the Fort for him to die in peace. And it wasn’t the scurvy or the lead that did him in, he collapsed because his legs could support him no longer. There was no room in the sledges, already filled with the sick, the resting, the dying who they did not want to stop to bury because that was time they couldn’t afford to lose, not when they were so close. They hauled in four-hour shifts, same as the ships, or until they could not bear it anymore. For two days, Sol traded the weight of a harness across his middle for Armitage’s thinned form slung over his shoulders, steady breathing in his ear. Sol doesn’t remember anything from when he fainted—10 miles from the Fort, 4 from a group of trappers looking for game—until he woke up four days later to the news that Armitage had passed in his sleep, only 30 minutes before.

“He was a good man,” Little says in a genuine sort of way, though he did not know Armitage particularly well, “and a crack shot.”

Funny, that’s the exact wording Sol used the first time around. Only he was using it as leverage to get more guns. How stupid that plan seems now, how hollow the words ring when used as a bargaining chip and not a eulogy. He concedes with a nod, a grunt that’s more of a sigh than an affirmation. If he speaks, he’s worried his voice will crack. It’s a miracle he can still cry after all these deaths, that he finds cause to feel sorrow rather than emptiness.

There is silence again, and a long one at that, before Little turns to look at him. There is a worried look in his eye, a tiredness Sol has come to welcome in his own body. He fits the words carefully in his mouth like he’s had years to practice what he’s about to say.

“You told me something extraordinary once, I’m hoping to repay the favour.”


	8. VII - Jopson/Little + Heavy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Heavy:** the time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> requested by bup-iv-icaine [ on tumblr](https://bup-iv-icaine.tumblr.com/)

The unraveling of history is not a linear affair. It offers, at the very least, a vague structure with which to utilise. One story bleeds into another, a dozen dropped threads amidst the telling of tales waiting to be picked back up and slotted into place. Assuming, of course, that every story has a place. Assuming, of course, that every life tidies up neat—no crooked picture frames with empty space in the centre, clothing handed down from one pair of needy hands to another, no mouths twisted in anger or hands balled up in fists rather than connecting with a jaw or nose.

It starts with little pretence. A comparison of the fabric of a _voyageur_ ’s waistcoat to a dress his youngest sister wore to her 20th birthday party. An odd memory of home a thousand and more miles from it, a reminder that the lives they left behind will continue whether they make it back to England. The cold and remnants of disease may well do them in. Or, they may choose not to go home at all, merely sending word of their survival without facing their failure head-on.

“I didn’t know you had a sister.”

“I have six.”

The shift in tense is not lost on either of them. Everyone they knew, everyone who came out to the docks to wave handkerchiefs and who kept candles burning for them at home, all the houses they grew up in, and the streets they scraped their knees on as boys, they could all be gone. England itself could be wiped off the map completely, scribbled out as if it’d never existed at all. There’s no way of knowing what’ll await them the next time they disembark a ship. When they first showed up, little more than bruised skin stretched tight over bones which threatened to shatter with every step and a fraction of their former numbers, there were three separate dispatch parties to alert every possible government of the now-found expedition.

There’s a sense of certainty to storytelling now. This is who they were when they left, they are not going to vanish, they will come back to the people and places left behind. They can continue to exist in the present rather than become ghost stories for future explorers to shiver at, lost causes for generations of children to learn about in schools.

* * *

History comes with a slight increase of ease after that. When Edward says _“my brother nearly went instead of me,”_ trailing off at the end before beginning to retreat inwards at this show of humanity, he is met with a simple _“which brother?”_. They build up each other’s lives, question by question. _“What’s that scar on your leg?”_ leads to a tale of slavers and gunfights leads to the answer for _“how’d you end up a steward”_. “What would you have done if you’d stayed ashore?” has no answer. In truth, he has no idea what or who he’d be if he’d never gone to sea, it’s an inextricable facet of his life now. And the questions like that, the ones that have no answers, that have no simple answers, the ones that have answers requiring extraction as rotten teeth do, they’re getting easier to put words to.

 _I want you to know these things_ , Edward thinks, as he lies awake at night. It is far too quiet without the groaning of the ship but filled with renewed sounds of life. _I want you to know me. I want to know you._

The next morning, he decides to ask the question that’s been plaguing him for months. In the moment of asking, they’ve been put in charge of assisting Mr. Diggle with supper. Though, in this case, ‘assisting’ means ‘skin and prepare three rabbits for stew while Mr. Diggle galivants in the Fort’s pantry to raid their stores under the guise of weakened men needing nutrients’. Every man must do his part, same as when they were hauling. Edward doesn’t mind this. He likes the quiet, the lack of stakes as he dices vegetables and very pointedly does not look at what used to be a rabbit and, well, he supposes still _is_ a rabbit, but not the way he’s used to thinking of it, in Thomas’ hands. It seems as good a time to ask as any. Besides, if he shirks his bravery once more, he’ll never get the question out.

“Who did you have to take care of before?” He’s greeted by nothing but knowing silence, the kind that demands follow-up rather than retreat. So, he continues, onward and upward. ”When the Captain was…ill. You knew what to do like you’d done it before.”

“I didn’t think you’d noticed. There was so much for you to do with the Captain indisposed.”

“I noticed you.”

More silence. There are a few things that they’ve accepted and moved past. He’s the one to prepare the vegetables because he has less experience with cooking dead rabbits. Maybe this will have to be another thing he accepts and doesn’t pry for information about.

“I won’t pressure you to share if you don’t wish to.”

There is a stillness that comes next. The two of them could make a perfect tableau for an artists’ rendering. Both holding their breath, unwilling to be the one who speaks next.

“I did the same thing with my mother.”

No more detail is necessary.

* * *

“Your brother, he must be a young man by now.”

“He would be, yes.”

Past tense, again.

* * *

Several days pass before they have an opportunity to speak again. Having confirmed that the Admiralty knows their location, there’s rather a lot to do before they pack up and continue their journey home. Provisions stowed away, nestled next to whatever personal artefacts they’ve managed to hold onto after all this time, clothing reinforced when it can be and discarded when there is no saving it, dogs prepared to be hooked to sledges.

“What happened to your mother?”

“What do you _think_ happened to my mother?”

“I want to believe that she got better, in the end. I want to believe that she’s waiting for you to come home.”

Maybe this is what loving someone is, it’s exposing your throat and putting a blade in their hand. It’s letting them draw a drop of blood and trusting them to do no further harm. He wants to say that he’s more himself when he’s with Thomas, that he can say things he doesn’t even want to think to himself but will otherwise drive him mad if kept inside— _I don’t think I would have been able to go on if we weren’t found when we were. I wish I could burn the whole damn Admiralty to a pile of ash. I didn’t do enough to help. Some days I get so lonely I wonder if you can die from it_ —but that isn’t the truth in its entirety. The truth is that, while none of the things he says are lies, he doesn’t know if they make him _him_. He’s unsure how to reconcile the person he is now with the person he was before they left port, with the person he would have been if the whole thing hadn’t gone belly-up. It’s difficult to draw to mind his younger days-walking the plank at swordpoint during a game of pirates with his siblings, sneaking from some awful ball to go down to the stables-without taking everything in context. If only the worst things in his life were unwanted marriage prospects. How he wishes he could return to an elevated state of boyhood, how he could identify each of Paganini’s 24 caprices by a single measure despite not having a lick of musical talent himself, the way his schoolboy Greek floundered when tasked with odes or elegy, but excelled in Homeric stanzas. He knows this is who he used to be, but, if asked to describe the Edward Little of 1848, of 1847, even of 1846 after they first buried John Torrington, he doesn’t know if he’d be able to. He lost something out there on the ice and maybe there won’t ever be getting any of it back.

But that’s how people change, isn’t it? By hook or by crook.

* * *

When the HMS _Enterprise_ docks at Greenhithe, nearly four years since _Terror_ and _Erebus_ set out, crowds from all over the country turn up to see the remains of the Expedition. Despite the crush of bodies at the dock, there is complete and utter silence as the gangplank lowers, first for _Enterprise_ ’s captain, then for Crozier and Fitzjames. A dropped hairpin would bear the weight of a stick of dynamite. As the crew makes their way back to dry land, to the sobs and waiting arms of loved ones, or spaces in the crowds where their families would have been, two figures stand out from the rest. They are a woman, frail from worry, with a damaged hand tucked out of sight and clothes she intends on wearing until they fall apart beyond repair, and a young man of around twenty years of age, all gangly limbs and restless energy. And, between the pair of them, they’ve got eyes of brilliant blue, clear as polished sea glass.


	9. VIII - Little & Irving + Wild Geese

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wild Geese: you do not have to be good

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> requested by an anon on tumblr! this is equally inspired by a silly throwaway line in prompt #4 which in turn was inspired by _maurice_ (the movie, i haven't finished the book) but only in the vaguest sense. you don't need to know the plot other than that it's the early 20th century and everyone is repressed. thanks so much to [whalersandsailors](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whalersandsailors) for betaing.

** STAGING NOTES **

**Characters:**

  * **Irving** (30s), the unhappy and somewhat aimless son of a minor aristocrat.
  * **Little** (30s), the gamekeeper for the estate, a minor character for the first half of the show.



**Setting:** the Scottish countryside, **1911**. It is mid-spring, warm enough to go out without a coat if one so desires, but not warm enough that one could get caught in the rain without a coat and expect not to come down with a cold. The action takes place on the grounds of an old estate, and a smaller cottage belonging to the estate’s gamekeeper. The cottage is small but cozy, far homier than the estate itself which is the austere, oppressive type, never in view for the audience but looming on the horizon. At the moment, it is around 3 in the afternoon, chilly, and threatening rain. 

**Props:**

  * umbrella
  * table
  * two chairs
  * matchbox
  * cigarette case
  * blanket
  * two mugs



**Sounds:**

  * aggressive thunder and lightning
  * torrential rain,
  * the crack of fire in the background—very subtle, but audible in quiet moments
  * boiling kettle.



* * *

ACT 3 SCENE 2 

**_LIGHTS UP._ ** _From DOWNSTAGE LEFT, enters IRVING. He's in casual dress and appears to be hurrying without a destination in mind. He does a loop of the stage and is halfway through the second when there is a rumble of thunder. He pauses, considers his surroundings, and takes the second half of the loop with more caution. With the rain coming soon, he should make his way back to the house, won't. There is another crack of thunder, the kind that rattles your teeth in your skull, then it begins to pour rain._

 **IRVING:** damn.

_He pauses again, wonders if it he should run to the house now. Or, would it be worth more to find a well-covered tree and wait the rain out, see if it lasts longer than five minutes and head back then._

_Before he can make this decision, a voice comes from STAGE RIGHT._

**LITTLE:** _(offstage)_ sir?

_LITTLE comes into view holding an umbrella. He jogs over to Irving, cautious of the slick grass, and holds the umbrella over him._

you’d best come inside, sir. You’ll catch your death out here.

 **IRVING:** nonsense, it’ll dry out in a—

_ENORMOUS crash of thunder that makes them both jump, followed by lightning not far away. At this, Irving steps under the proffered umbrella and follows Little OFFSTAGE RIGHT._

**_SETTING CHANGE:_** _we are now inside the cottage. It's built for one person but can fit two. In fact, it's as though the cottage and its inhabitant have been waiting for the occasion of company. CENTRE FACING DOWNSTAGE, Little, now in dry clothes, is busying himself with the kettle. Irving enters from CENTRE SL, also wearing dry clothes that don’t quite fit him but fit well enough._

 **IRVING:** thank you— _(a broad gesture, trying to say ‘thank you for the dry clothes, for bringing me out of the rain’. It falls a bit flat but still carries meaning)_.

 **LITTLE:** you’re shivering. Sit down.

_He does, in the chair closest to SL. Little hands him a blanket, well-loved and well-made. Irving drapes it first over his lap, then, when he still shivers, tucks it around his shoulders._

**IRVING:** thank you.

 **LITTLE:** _(buried fondness)_ what were you doing out in the rain?

 **IRVING:** I couldn’t stay in the house anymore. It’s so lonely.

 **LITTLE:** it’s a beautiful place.

 **IRVING:** so is a museum, but that’s not somewhere people live _(beat)_. Are you happy here?

 **LITTLE:** what do you mean, sir?

 **IRVING:** I mean, do you like it here? This job, this place, my family.

 **LITTLE:** I like it as well as any man can like his employment. 

**IRVING:** I despise it here, have for a while now.

 **LITTLE:** if you’ll forgive me for being forward, why not leave? If you’re so unhappy, I mean.

 **IRVING:** oh, I’ve tried. I’ve been at sea, went on a grand tour of my own in a way, spent a while in Australia before you were here. I would have stayed there, had I not been such a burden on the family purse strings _(beat)_. But, it turns out melancholy is the same no matter where you go. It makes little difference where I am, staying's easier at this point. I was born in this house, I’ll likely die in it too. But maybe I should leave, go somewhere I won’t have to worry. Then at least I’d do one thing right. One bloody thing right after a lifetime of disappointments.

 **LITTLE:** is that how you see yourself then?

 **IRVING:** _(suddenly realising)_ I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to unload all this on you. You must get enough of being talked at rather than to. My openness isn’t disregard for you and your person. There are few I find easy to converse with, and I suppose you’re one of them. But I’ll stop if you want me to, and I needn’t impose on your hospitality any longer. 

_He half-rises to leave, even though it is now raining even harder than before. It’s a futile gesture anyway, Irving doesn’t really want to leave, he wants to hear that he can stay._

**LITTLE:** you aren’t imposing at all, sir. And I do—

_The kettle cuts off the next words, startling them both. Little stands, pours the water into two mugs, and stirs the contents. He returns to the table and hands one mug—the unchipped one—to Irving. There is a pause while they drink._

**LITTLE:** I was going to say, that I don’t mind your presence or your talking.

 **IRVING:** _(quietly)_ oh.

 **LITTLE:** it’s nice to have someone talk to me like I’m a person worth conversation. 

**IRVING:** oh. Yes, I imagine it must get quite lonely. 

**LITTLE:** it’s rather a lot of ‘I know we gave you the afternoon off, but, Little, would you clean up the rose bushes after you’ve done the weeding’ and, ‘Little, be sure that the hounds are ready tomorrow. We’ll be hunting at dawn’ only for them to take it back the next morning when Mr. So-and-so has come down with a terrible cold. I don’t remember the last time someone talked to me without ordering me around. _(remembering who he’s talking to, stumbling)_ I mean, please excuse me, sir. I meant no impertinence. 

**IRVING:** I’ll excuse your impertinence if you’ll excuse my whingeing. After all, I’m the one who barged into your home to grouse about my unhappiness.

 **LITTLE:** I invited you into my home.

 **IRVING:** so you did _(beat)._ And what of your family, your history, what’s it like?

 **LITTLE:** there’s not much to it. Some of my family’s in Jersey, the rest scattered about. Nothing particularly scandalous nor exciting. I’m one of twelve, so there were a lot of arguments about baths and clothes when I was a boy. A lot of trying to find a reason for people to remember me without slipping through the cracks.

 **IRVING:** twelve! Your poor mother.

 **LITTLE:** I’ve no idea which was worse, the childbearing, or the childrearing. 

**IRVING:** I’d worry more about raising children than birthing them. Birth must be painful, surely, but it's over soon enough. Raising children means you've got to live with them. There’s so much pressure to do it right, for them to be right— _(stops himself. Beat)_. Sometimes I wake up and wonder what went wrong with me, why everything that’s so easy for my fellowes is so difficult for me.

 **LITTLE:** and what is ‘everything’ if you don’t mind my asking, sir?

 **IRVING:** just...just acting like a normal human being! My life is a trick being played on me and I need someone to tell me what I’m doing wrong so I can fix it!

 **LITTLE:** like you’ve got an entirely different set of rules to live by but you don’t know what they are. 

_At this, Irving almost drops his mug, halfway to his mouth, before putting it down clumsily. It stuns him to hear someone else put this feeling he thought was invented for the sole sake of his misery into words. He begins to consider that maybe he isn’t the only person to ever feel like this, be like this._

**IRVING:** yes...that’s it exactly.

 **LITTLE:** _(tentative, hoping)_ there's this feeling of...wrongness deep inside you but you can't explain it. You just know that you're wrong somehow.

 **IRVING:** irredeemably so.

 **LITTLE:** unlovable.

 **IRVING:** unwanted.

 **LITTLE:** unneeded. 

**IRVING:** everything about my life, my home, my schooling, my inheritance, my career, even my name, it was all someone else’s before it was mine and it will be someone else’s after I’m gone. And I wonder why it all matters, why I still try so hard, why I still want people to love when they’ll only ever like me. I feel trapped under a glass, with everyone I know crowded around me trying to find a fatal flaw, some tiny crack when I’m held up to the light; and when they find it, I’ll be cast out for good. And sometimes I want…

 **LITTLE:** _(beat)_ what do you want?

 **IRVING:** far too many things to list. Far more things than I ought to say in polite company.

 **LITTLE:** and I count as polite company, sir?

 **IRVING:** we’re keeping company are we not? And I find you agreeable. 

**LITTLE:** an important quality in a gamekeeper, I’m sure.

 **IRVING:** _(joking)_ not so much as your ability to shape a hedge, but it’s of similar value.

_The rain picks up for a minute, nails against the glass. It's followed by another crack of thunder that seems to shake the cottage’s foundation. Little says something rendered indiscernible by the weather._

**IRVING:** WHAT?

 **LITTLE:** _[unintelligible]_ I said _[crack, unintelligible]_. NEVERMIND.

_They sit in silence for a moment, waiting for the storm to die down. After a spell, the conversation starts again._

**IRVING:** can you keep a secret?

 **LITTLE:** I’ve kept my fair share.

 **IRVING:** sometimes I have these fantasies, these awful dreams of doing something scandalous. You know, making a proper spectacle of myself, get my name stricken from guest lists and barred from genteel society for as long as I live. And I don’t mean drinking in excess before noon and plunging fully clothed into a fountain, or insulting someone to their face in the middle of dinner, or even winding up in a cell for some minor offense that could be paid off by morning. I want to do something shocking, something that will hurt everyone, disgrace my entire family line. Centuries of John Irvings as pillars of society, all brought down by me. There are secrets I could reveal about myself that would make my father’s hair white with shock. 

**LITTLE:** what’s stopping you? What’s keeping you from damning them all and walking out forever? If it would make you happy, why not chance it?

 **IRVING:** fear, I suppose. Duty too. I don’t wish to seem ungrateful for the comfort I’ve been afforded. And I have this misguided hope that if I do one thing right then maybe everything else will even itself out. 

**LITTLE:** I don’t think it’s ungrateful to want happiness. And I don’t think it’s worth killing yourself to try and keep up a life that you don’t want. 

**IRVING:** _(they are dancing too close to the truth for his comfort, he changes the subject quickly)_ do you have a smoke?

_Little rummages through his pocket and produces a plain case and matchbook. He slides them across the table. Irving opens the case and puts a cigarette between his lips. He fumbles slightly with the matchbook, hands trembling, unable to get it to light. Whether this is a result of the lingering cold from the rain or something else is uncertain. He strikes the match three times with no result. Little reaches across the table and takes the matches from his hands. He is half standing, leaning forward so their faces are considerably closer. The match lights on the first try. He cups a hand around the flame, lighting the cigarette, and lingers for a moment._

**IRVING:** _(quietly)_ thank you.

 **LITTLE:** it’s no problem, sir. 

**IRVING:** you don’t need to call me that, not when we’re— _(gestures at his surroundings and borrowed clothes but can't bring himself to say 'alone')_. I think we can use each other’s Christian names if you'd consent to that.

 **LITTLE:** alright.

_Time passes, the sky lightens for a moment but darkens again. The closest strike of lightning yet shatters any hope of clear skies. The cigarette goes back and forth across the table, the mugs are refilled, a deck of cards materialises and they play a game. By now, several hours have passed since they first sat down._

**IRVING:** what do you want?

 **LITTLE:** hmm?

 **IRVING:** I told you of my wants, it would seem fair if you repaid the favour…Only if you want to, of course. I won't make you share anything you don't wish. 

**LITTLE:** that’s a lot to ask.

 **IRVING:** you needn't answer if you don’t want to.

 **LITTLE:** it’s not that I don’t want to answer, it’s that I don’t know the answer. I’ve never been able to pin down what I want. So, I suppose, I want to know. I want to be able to make decisions without worrying whether they’re right or wrong. When I finally choose something, half the time it’s wrong, and the other half even if it’s right I convince myself it isn’t. Maybe one day I’ll be able to live without second-guessing myself.

 **IRVING:** like being seen through a glass!

 **LITTLE:** like being in a glass held up to the sun, the only way out gets you burned.

 **IRVING:** rock and a hard place.

 **LITTLE:** devil and the deep sea. I hope you get to leave, someday. I mean, I hope one day you’ll be happy with yourself.

 **IRVING:** I wish you the same.

_The lights dim, slowly. Right before they go out, there is a flash of motion: a hand reaching across the table, a card game abandoned. Then,_

**BLACKOUT.**


	10. IX - Irving/William Malcolm + Staying Alive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Staying Alive: how can we ever stop looking? How can we ever turn away?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt given by [saintssebastian on tumblr](https://saintssebastian.tumblr.com) / [phoebus on ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phoebus)

Burnfoot House, Burnfoot,   
Westerkirk, Langholm  
12 March, 1857

My Dear Irving,

I’m hoping this letter arrives sooner than the other one sent with my name and address attached, this one bears far more importance. As you will soon hear—as you may have already heard, should this letter arrive after the other—I’m to wed in the late spring. My bachelorhood has outrun its usefulness when I’ve an estate to manage. I can no longer use the reasoning that I have a Dear Ailing Friend to stand by when Your Expedition is only one of many tragedies the Commonwealth has endured. Do not take that to mean that I believe you and the other survivors will ever return to the state of innocence prior to your ordeal in the ice. I think too highly of you to write away the horrors you must have experienced and know that even 10 years on, what happened at the top of the world troubles you still and likely will continue till the end of days. 

I shan't call it love, this match. Mary Douglas is from an excellent family and I believe shall prove to be an excellent wife. Truly, I feel we will be happy together, and is that not the most a man can ask for in his marriage? Not a nice tract of land as a dowry, not twelve fat children all of whom will be entered into advantageous marriages themselves, but contentment with one another? The purpose of my writing is twofold: both in informing you of the Impending Nuptials in a way far less informal than a card sent out to half the families in the country, and asking you for a favour. Would you do me the honour of being my best man at the ceremony? There is no other I would rather have by my side for such an occasion, and I long to see you once more.

Dearest and best of friends, I fear a great many things have already changed, with little consultation given to us in the process. I remember you carrying me on your back along Bighi Bay when we were young men, how you were discontented by my weight after a spell but insisted it was no trouble, that you wanted to do this. As the years advance, I find myself escaping more and more to our time onboard the _Belvidera_ and remember how careless we were then. Perhaps "careless" is not the right word; carefree would be more accurate. There is a rosy sheen over my time at sea, and I regret my early leave due to ill health. What I would have given to stay there with you and Kingston and the deep teal of the sea against our hull. Look at me, reminiscing like an old fool, like those days were Hellenic in scale, too far away to touch without the tips of your fingers crumbling to dust. How very foolish and careless of me, to believe that we could ever go back to that.

I'll leave you with this request: that my doors are open at Burnfoot for you on any of your whims. You needn't ever write ahead, need only show and I will be there to greet you. Come the day you get this even, or the day after, or any other day should you be so inclined. Only I do entreat that you come by in the time before the wedding. The fruit will be ripening soon, and blossoming trees shedding their bounty into our hair. There will be sunlight creeping up in the evening and that fresh, cool scent of spring and things returning to life. I think I come back to life when I am with you, I think when my eyes droop I return to happiness felt only by the squeeze of your hand.

Would you have it that this letter is the third draft I have written? And that even now I am debating slashing through the offending phrases before tearing it to bits as I did with its predecessors. The first was rather loquacious. You'd have to read it 10 times to divine meaning, everything was so tangled up in my head; I open my mouth to speak and instead of a tongue there's a ball of golden thread spiralling down labyrinthine corridors of things I could never say. The second draft was better in that it was cohesive, worse in that there was not very much of substance and the majority of the words were an impassioned entreaty for you to Forsake Society and run away with me. But we are not young men, we cannot return to those past selves. Here's the truth, I'll write it down then seal this up before I have a chance to take it back. For a great deal of my life, I was quite breathlessly in love with you. I think I existed only to read your letters and when there was no news of _Terror_ after three years I nearly went mad with grief. I loved you, once. If it had been allowed, I would have gotten down on one knee and proposed. I would've said my vows and kissed you in front of the whole Kirk.

Please, come to Burnfoot. If you find you cannot tear yourself away from Edinburgh, I will simply have to come to you. Write, or don't, of your travel plans, and please take my offer to heart. It has been an honour and a privilege to be your friend for so many years, a more admirable fellow I know not of. Know that ever should your opinion of me change, mine of you shall not; as it is, I am glad to be

yours,

William E. Malcolm.

* * *

106 Princes Street, Edinburgh  
23 March, 1857

My Dear Malcolm,

I was overjoyed to receive your letter(s) and even more so your invitation to join you at Burnfoot. Unfortunately, I must decline this invitation for now, though it is not because I do not wish to see you. Rather, I’ve come down with a wicked cold. Well, the doctor diagnosed it as mild bronchitis, but I don’t think it is so bad. Nonetheless, I don’t wish to infect you (or anyone else along the way), so I am bedridden for my own safety until my recovery, whenever that may be. You know that it takes longer for me to heal now than it once did, and that my lungs have seen far better days. I do lament that I will not be able to meet you as planned—do you think spring’s blossoms will delay a while so that we could enjoy them together? No? Ah, well it was worth a try—but the moment I am able, I will board a train to you. In the meantime, will you keep me company? Write to me, I mean. I am not suggesting you abandon all your duties to play nursemaid to an Dear Ailing friend, brought to his knees by a runny nose and fever (though I have few doubts that you would do exactly that, were it required of you). After all, you’ve an estate and a fiancée to tend to now, and forgive me for not including my congratulations at the start of this letter; I should have written them in gold ink, in my largest hand, to be read first. Nonetheless, I shall express the sentiment in a far more underwhelming medium. Please accept my dearest congratulations, and pass them along to the future Mrs Malcolm as well. Please accept my acceptance of your offer as well, it is a greater honour than even the Queen herself could bestow on me.

Do tell me of her, Miss Douglas, that is and not Her Majesty. I wish to know of her character, her affects and her accomplishments. I have no doubt she is a fine woman, and look forward to meeting her once I am hale. But, until then, I would like you to sketch a word-portrait of her which I may hold in my mind as I do yours, I wish to meet her in spirit before I meet her in body. And tell me of Burnfoot too, has it changed since I visited last? The colours must be beautiful at dusk, and with the wind whistling through fields of heather, the meadowlarks keening in the wee hours of morning, you are alone without ever being alone. I do miss my time there, I miss it dearly, but there was too much quiet to keep me at ease. You would think what with all the noise and bustle of the city would be a distraction, but I think it is what keeps me sane. Too much quiet makes me nervous, the way wide open spaces make me nervous, the way bruises I don’t remember getting make me nervous.

Tell me about the small details of your life, the way it is now before everything changes. Tell me of the things you hardly think of, the quiet mundanities of your days. I want to know all of it. In return I will share with you my own private thoughts.

You write of Forsaking Society and crossed-out sentences. Would it relieve you to know that I wrote the same letter to you and never sent it either? That I’ve been writing it for years? I must have penned a dozen different versions by now, from Australia when I was put up in bed with dysentery, aboard the decks of every ship I’ve berthed on, over and over again over Arctic stones when I had scant hope of ever coming home. I wrote to you so many times. I do believe I came back from the dead for you. Were we younger—were I bolder, more like—I would have clasped your hands in mine so tightly my knuckles would go white and whisper ‘'let's run, Elphie. Let's run and never look back. If we steal away in the middle of the night there'll be no chance of them catching up to us”. But alas, we are no longer young men. Remember when we were midshipman, when the crew put on _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ for our yuletide masque. All us middies cast as the rude mechanicals—you Starveling, I Snout, and Kingston Snug—I was awful, that was for certain. I don’t remember my few lines, haven’t picked up the play since that year, but I remember Lysander’s plea to Hermia: _if thou lovest me then, steal forth thy father’s house to-morrow night_. Sometimes I wish I had done this, sometimes I think it’s still worth a try. I didn’t need a proposal on one knee or vows spoken in front of the whole kirk, had that been allowed in some world a great deal kinder than ours. I would have married you under the open skies, at sea, in a seedy back alley if that was what you wanted. I would have, I would have. If you had asked me in your letter, I still would have said yes.

I hope you do not think me a sentimentalist for what you have read. I hope you do not think me a fool for still believing that there’s some good in the world after what I’ve seen. I’m sorry I cannot tell you everything. Maybe one day when we are old and grey and still, I hope, penning each other foolish letters filled with boyish declarations and overwrought emotions I will. Should you take me for a sentimental wretch, I pray that you not believe it to be at the expense of my character.

I am enclosing a sketch from my bedroom window, it is a view I must find new joys in for forever. You’ve probably seen this exact view before, I’ve sketched it for you before. Perhaps there will be a new light with which to view it in.

In sickness (ha!) and in health, I remain, as always,

Your dearly devoted friend,

John Irving


	11. X - Silna + When Death Comes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Death Comes: I was a bride married to amazement

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey. it's been a while. nobody asked for this prompt and i do still have 2 gathering dust in my inbox but i've wanted to write this one since the parks canada video surfaced earlier this year so here it is! for clarification: the expedition within the context of this fic happens as it did in history. no tuunbaq, no definitive answer of what happened. silna is an underwater archaeologist working on the victoria strait expedition in 2014 when erebus was first found. cool? cool.

_Queen Maud Gulf, 2014._

Year after year, the ice refuses to give up her secrets.

In a matter of weeks, their window of opportunity will close once more.  Summer will give way to fall, and the ice will seal its cracks again, capturing anything it allowed to slip through. Silna cannot let another summer pass without finding anything.  The _CCGS_ _Sir Wilfrid Laurier_ has spent severalsummers in the Arctic with several crews trying to find some evidence that Franklin’s Expedition existed at all. Other ships spent longer before them.

Al curses under his breath and goes back from the railing, muttering about another year going to waste.  Silna wants to remind him that they’re in the right spot or a rough approximation of the right spot, but that would likely only frustrate him more.  Her very presence is likely to frustrate him because he wanted her father on this expedition with him, not his daughter fresh out of grad school. She and Al have that in common, they both wish her dad was here. Unfortunately, that can’t happen right now and they must make do with each other.

This _has_ to be the right place, they have the testimony to prove it, testimony that nobody believed for years. Water cannot stay stagnant.  The ships must have been carried off a little as they were sinking when the ice receded enough to let the water pull them under. But things don’t move from the ocean floor. These wrecks are part of her DNA. Her father dedicated his life to doing what he could to push the search forward. Her grandfather helped compile testimony into a neat little book. How far back does this line go? She’s the one who must see it through to the end.

Fallow attempts to be reassuring about sending out another submersible this afternoon, though there's little ring of promise to it.  The good news about the short summers is that they have the rest of the year to upgrade their tech, and sonar keeps getting better and better.  The bad news is that all the new technology in the world doesn’t seem to help them find anything but their own repeating trail.

“Hey,” Sasha says from beside her, handing over a mug of  slightly  burnt coffee, “the water’s so shallow here we should be able to see wreckage no problem .”

“If the water’s so shallow,” Silna says, more for her own benefit, “then why haven’t we seen anything?”

* * *

In her narrow bunk, Silna awakes from a familiar dream. The one with the skeletons crawling out of the deep, who come to her bed and demand to know what’s taking her so long. _I’m trying_ , she wants to tell them, _we’ve been trying for years_. But it isn’t good enough. Beneath two pairs of woollen socks and blankets, her feet still feel cold.  Above her is Fallow’s steady breathing; around her, the motion of the ship attempting to lull her back into a sleep that will not hold. She tries to imagine being aboard _Erebus_ (or _Terror_ , though it’s _Erebus_ she’s more fond of. She thinks it’s the name, the irony.  The darkness that keeps the earth and the underworld from overlapping, a barrier between life and death), the constant creak of the ship’s hull like a sore spine, the hammocks strung up in the galley. She is glad that she has a bunk, even gladder that her sleeping quarters are not as cramped as _Erebus_ _’_ were. When the ships were trapped, could the crew hear it in the night, the sound of the ice pushing against the wood? Did they know what would happen to their ship, to them, if the spring thaw did not come? And, if they did, how in the world did they ever sleep through it.  She imagines it must have been deafening, _Erebus_ ’ struggle against the elements before her hull was finally pierced. It must have been the loudest thing on earth, the rumble of your own mortality closing in around you. 

How long did it take before the sea claimed her, and if they find her, how many pieces will she be in?  Silna wonders what it must have sounded like before the waves finally closed over the topmast, whether _Erebus_ let out one final dying wail before her timbers went silent. She wonders if anyone was around to hear it.

In the dark, she fumbles for her watch and screws up her eyes as the Aurora-green face glows, the tiny _tic-tic-tic_ of mechanical hands slicing through the silence. 04:47. The sun will be rising soon, and the crew with it. Their scant window of opportunity will freeze over in a few weeks. They’ve got to make use of every second they have, may as well start early.

Silna dresses silent and quick in the darkness. She can feel the scratch of her fleece’s tag against the hollow of her throat but does not adjust it. She holds her boots in one hand and grips the ladder with the other, thinking of _Erebus_ ’ cargo. Enough coal for twelve days. Food to last them three years. 69 thousand pounds of pemmican.  4000 pounds of lemon juice that would have lost most of its antiscorbutic properties before they started walking. 16 thousand pounds of incorrectly-tinned meat. Did the ship’s cargo weigh her down?  All those books in the library that were left behind to rot at the bottom of the ocean, the memoirs of other explorers who’d return to tell their tales from the end of the world, the memories from home, how much did they weigh?

When the men finally abandoned ship, they took with them only what they could drag in their emaciated state. A knife. A notebook. A math medal. Those are the things they thought were important. Those are the only record that exists of their path. It is a history written in bone and absence.  In her pocket is a scan of the muster list from Greenwich, the paper brackish from the air and water, as soft and worn as vellum from the number of times it’s been folded and unfolded.

They were so young. That’s the thing she finds herself stuck on most days. These were not old men. John Torrington became the first casualty at 19. If visiting today, he’d only  just be old enough to drink.  This was not an expedition manned solely by grey-haired men with nothing but empty air between their temples. By all accounts, they should have survived.  _Why couldn't you leave my home alone_ , she thinks with a hiss of pain as her knee connects with a rung, why didn’t you stay home with your families and your lives? Why was a strip of water such a prize that you were willing to die for it? The thought dies almost as soon as she let it breathe. She crawls up, deck by deck, careful to move without making a sound. It is easy to be angry with Franklin and the others, but she has better targets for her rage than the dead.

She thinks back to the message to the public Robert Falcon Scott wrote before he starved to death: _We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and_ _therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last_. England made him a martyr for those words. Well,  in between portraying him as a bumbling fool who led 5 other men to their deaths alongside him. Neither of those assumptions is fair, she thinks. The same with Franklin. One of the Empire’s all-time tragic heroes or a doddering old man whose hubris cost 129 lives? Who’s to say. The only opinions that matter now belong to the dead.

I wish you could have gone home. I want to bring you home. At last, she does up her boots and climbs up to the main deck. What greets her is a sky such a deep red she wants to shake herself awake, or clamber back down to her bunk and feign sleep.  Up here, the world is so vast and so quiet that it is easy for her to think she is the only living thing for miles even though she’s got a whole crew with her.  Franklin’s men must have felt that way too as they dragged their lives behind them until their bodies gave way to rot. They could have walked for weeks without seeing another living thing.

_Red sky in morning, sailors take warning_. As her eyes adjust, she sees the sunrise is not so fierce a crimson as she thought, but rather a deep, autumnal orange. The sun breaks over the horizon like it’s being cradled by the tide. They are the only living things out here, there is nothing to block the sky from her. Try getting a view like this anywhere else, she feels something like pride well up. From her pocket, she withdraws the crew list and stares, lips forming the names without sound. She sits on the cold deck and traces each man’s handwriting. Their looping cursive and slash-dotted 'i's. Nobody has handwriting like that anymore, it's nothing but another relic. _I am trying to find you. Please give me a sign._

It is so quiet save for the waves lapping against the hull, the dull hum of _Laurier_ ’s machinery. She can hear _kanguq_ 's cries if she holds her breath and listens.  They must be beginning to prepare for their journey south soon, as the crew will when the ice refuses to yield to them once again. To break the silence feels like a declaration of intent. She knows this is the right place. She refuses to go home empty-handed once more.  She owes it to these men and their families, the ones who waited at home as their longing soured to despair, and the ones now who are still hoping for any sort of answer. And she owes it to her family, her people who were the last ones to see them alive but could do nothing to help. Everyone was hungry those sparse few years, they may have been able to feed a few men but not all.

Silna sets her jaw until she feels her teeth grind together. “I’m not leaving here without you,” she whispers  fiercely  , and begins to read. She starts with _Erebus_ , always _Erebus_. “Sir John Franklin. James Fitzjames. Graham Gore. Henry Thomas Dundas Le Vesconte.  James Walter Fairholme…” She reads all the way down from officers to the ships’ boys ( eighteen, oh god they were nothing more than children ) stopping to breathe only when she must. If she stops, she’ll fall to despair, and she cannot let that happen. They’re going to find the wrecks, she will not entertain the possibility of failure.

Before she can read the roll call of _Terror_ ’s dead, there is a great heaving sound somewhere below them. The sound of history cracking open. She allows herself a moment of panic, that _Laurier_ will be swept under. They will not have time to call for rescue.  She fears that the hull will not hold, that something horrible has happened and she will find the wrecks only as her final resting place.  The ship was built to last, it’s made to withstand ice and keep them safe, but then again that’s what they said about Franklin’s ships, wasn’t it?  The noise grows louder, almost like a wail from somewhere primordial underneath the waves.

Silna stands, the deck heaves beneath her though she can see no great change in the water.  She does not know what this sound is, or what it could be, but she knows that she should wake the rest of the crew on the chance that there is some danger. That is if they haven’t all been pitched out of their bunks by the motion. _Laurier_ ’s slow, bobbing path along the Victoria Strait seems to pick up for a moment. There is a shape, a few yards away from them, dark and looming. Even in the amber light of the sunrise, the water is so clear she can see all the way down.

_A mast._ Suddenly  the boundary between life and death does not seem so shadowy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- would like to clarify that silna's dad is NOT DEAD in this case he's just sick/injured for Plot Purposes!!  
> \- _kanguq_ (ᑲᖑᖅ) is the inuktitut name for the snow goose, which is native to some parts of newfoundland. snow geese is also the name of another mary oliver poem  
> \- i am not an archaeologist at all and do not understand how underwater archaeology or science work beyond wanting to believe in the transformative power of love and the thirst for knowledge! for more info on how erebus (and terror) were found, see these links [[1]](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/divers-recover-more-than-350-artifacts-from-hms-erebus-shipwreck-180974251/) [[2]](https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/09/09/the_star_with_the_franklin_search_how_the_franklin_wreck_was_finally_found.html)

**Author's Note:**

> -i remain [@nedlittle](https://nedlittle.tumblr.com) on tumblr and [@kitnotmarlowe](https://twitter.com/kitnotmarlowe) on twitter  
> and you *can* still send in mary oliver prompts if you want!


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